Here is a somewhat off-topic question for you: what is the job market like for C++? Is it mostly maintaining/enhancing legacy code or is there considerable new code being written in C++?
When I worked in systems programming (automobile systems research), C++ was very popular in the embedded/systems space. I believe it still is. Many systems people I knew were porting C to C++. Old code was maintained and new code was written. I'd say the break-down was about 50 50. In addition to adding C++ features, maintaining C compatibility was paramount.
I never worked with higher-level applications, but I'm sure that there's a lot of C++ up there too (web browsers, office suites, etc). Maybe even more.
Well, that's no longer true - Rust and Go are two contenders for C++'s "niche". They are still growing, but are already much nicer languages than C++. In some situations Erlang or Ocaml can also replace C++ successfully.